Quality of Service in local area networks intended for home entertainment and domotic applications

Recent advances in digital technologies for the consumer market have determined the evolution of digital infrastructures even in the field of domestic installations. IP-based networks are suitable for conveying data for a very wide range of services; therefore, it is foreseeable that modern houses will be provided only with IP-based backbones, that is the case, for example, of Ethernet wirings. Both signals for the delivery of multimedia contents (e.g. TV programs, movies, music) and for domestic automation (e.g. household appliances, lighting and surveillance controls) will run along digital backbones connecting rooms together, and the whole house with external networks. In this kind of local area networks (LANs), quality of service (QoS) will be a fundamental issue to ensure right operation, and to face the occurrence of congestion conditions, due to bandwidth demanding multimedia services. In this paper, we consider a possible scenario in which multiple multimedia and control streams are conveyed over the same LAN, and study a possible solution for QoS implementation, that relies on a Linux-based QoS router.